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Fox News host Tucker Carlson discussed the dire state of freedom in the US during a recent trip to Hungary, commenting that the European country is in ways freer than the United States.
This is by far the weirdest thing I’ve ever done, but I’m really enjoying it and I’m grateful to be here.
Dennis Prager is standing there. It’s unbelievable...
Anyway, thank you so much for having me. We have been here for a week and we’ve loved it. We’ve really, really loved it and it has been very different from what we expected.
So, I work at Fox News in the United States, which is not available here. I know sadly I couldn’t agree more…and every year we try to go someplace around the world and see what it looks like and see how people live outside the United States.
The US is a continental country and it’s very cut off from the rest of the world…those of you who are from there, have been there, know and you don’t really get a sense that there are other people in the world living, you know, happy lives, and so once in a while it’s worth getting out.
So we come here, I was impressed personally by the response of your government to the 2015 migrant crisis. Hungary stood alone, essentially, in saying you know, ‘No thanks,’ and that struck me as a totally legitimate thing to do, and I had heard that Budapest was a beautiful city, nice people, good food, so we came.
So, we were here three days…I don’t do social media. I don’t know if you know what social media are, sort of the beginning of the end of civilization and literacy, so I don’t participate at all. So I had no real sense of how our trip…I mean we’re just in the end run a cable show. We’re not elected to anything. We have no actual power other than the power to talk unimpeded, which is increasingly a rare luxury in the United States. So I didn’t really have a sense of how it was going until yesterday – and I’m gonna I need my glasses because I’m getting a little old – one of my producers sent me the following tweet. Now this is from someone whose name you probably will not recognize. I won’t say it, but this is a longtime Washington Post columnist who works for the Atlantic Magazine who is reportedly an expert on the region, as we say in Washington, where I’m from, ‘the region’ – and the region can encompass like a huge geographic area with, you know, maybe dozens of countries with different cultures in different languages, but in Washington we reduce it to something called a ‘region,’ and you become an expert in the region and you are the person we ask when we want to understand what’s going on there.
So, this person who sent this out isn’t an expert on the ‘region,’ and I happen to know since I live there this person is actually stupid. Most people don’t know that, so people read her Twitter feed, so I read the following and I want to read this slowly for those of you who don’t have English as a first language, so I want you to catch every word and those of you who are from America will understand why it was the funniest thing I’ve read this year. And I’m quoting, “In Orbon’s Hungary, more than 90 percent of the media is controlled by the ruling party businesses are physically and legally harassed. If they don’t toe the party line…Election,” listen, this gets better, “Elections are manipulated,” and my favorite, “Party leaders are mysteriously rich,” and I thought to myself, ‘Wait a second, that sounds familiar. I live in that country.’ I live in a country where over 90 percent of the media are aligned with the ruling party. In fact, I work at the only mass media outlet in the entire country of 340 million that is not aligned with the ruling party.
You watch CNN, which I believe is available here – and I think they may be here today. Welcome CNN. I worked there for many years – and you will never hear a single word on CNN that deviates from the party line coming from the White House of the United States, from the Biden Administration.
That’s exactly right.
I have lived in cities. I know that if you were dumb enough to put up a sign in the window of your store in an American city disagreeing with the prevailing party orthodoxy on any one of a number of questions, whether it’s immigration, human sexuality, who you’re going to vote for… you get your windows smashed. If you disobey the political orders from the ruling party, they’ll shut you down. And I live in a country where Barack Obama, who has never actually had a paying job in the private sector, is now living on, you know, a 30-million dollar estate on an island off the coast of Massachusetts and throwing himself a birthday party, I believe today with 200 servants. So I think we’re checking the ‘Politicians become mysteriously rich’ box on that.
So, I read this and I think – and I am as patriotic American as you’re gonna find, I’m not leaving. I will never leave no matter what happens to the country. I don’t have a foreign passport. I’m in…in fact that’s one of the reasons I’m so passionate about it, because I have nowhere to go and I’ve got four children and four dogs and they don’t travel well, we’re not leaving. So I’m all in on America, and I think you know this is a…this is a really dark moment in American history, but I think that it will improve.
So I’m not attacking America, merely the current condition of America when I say that – I read that and I laughed out loud because it’s hilarious. You’re lecturing this landlocked central European country of 10 million that has free and fair elections which has a much healthier media balance – I’m sure every person in the front row is from the opposition media whatever that is I don’t know because I don’t speak Hungarian, because it’s a secret code inaccessible to those who weren’t born speaking yet, so there’s a lot I don’t know about Hungary, but I know a robust political system when i see one, no one in Hungary on the other side has to hire armed bodyguards. Lots of people in the United States do. I can tell you you are living under physical threat if you disagree in a loud way, you are immediately censored if you’re dependent upon social media to get your message out. I think America is the greatest country in the world. I will always think that, but don’t tell me it’s freer than Hungary, because that’s a lie.
So I read this and I find it hilarious because it suggests not only a high level of stupidity, which after all these years in Washington I take for granted because that’s the, you know, that’s the soup I’m drinking, that’s the world I live in, but it also suggests a total lack of self-awareness. A total lack.